Slow Progress

One day in July 1947, just before taking off to see his dying mother in Independence, President Truman signed an important piece of legislation at Washington's National Airport. It was the National Security Act which had just been passed by Congress and which was designed to bring order and teamwork to the squabbling military establishment.

To the President and to the U.S. people, enactment of the law was a relief. Despite the triumphs of World War II, the U.S. had never quite recovered from its indignation over the disastrous lack of military coordination first exposed at Pearl Harbor. Now, it seemed, the law would at long last force the services to get together.

The people relaxed. But soon the puzzled taxpayers, tapped for billions of dollars to support the nation's greatest peacetime fighting machine, were reading that all was not going well with unification. Interservice wrangling not only continued, but actually increased.

Defense Secretary Jim Forrestal hauled the top brass and the top braid off to the seclusion of Key West and Newport, ostensibly--so the reports said--to knock the big heads together. But on close inspection, the big heads emerged not even bloody, much less unbowed. Was "unification" a failure?

Three in the Ring. Some confusion stemmed from the false notion that the act was supposed to ''merge" the forces. It was supposed to do nothing of the kind. It did, in fact, create the Air Force as a separate arm (thus putting three battlers into the ring instead of two). At the insistence of the Navy, the act precluded real unity in operations by proclaiming that the Navy should keep its air arm and hang on to the Marines (a land force). The Secretaries of the three services were given the specific right--which they freely exercised--to bypass the Defense Secretary and carry their special pleading to the President and the Director of the Budget. They could always directly influence Congress and its committees.

Last week, a group of experts of the Hoover Commission* leveled further criticism at the unification plan. The committee reported that: 1) "the military services are far too prodigal with Government funds"; and 2) "the continuance of intense interservice rivalries hampers and confuses sound policy at many points . . ."

Under the Roof. Defense Secretary Forrestal has insisted from the beginning that unification must be gradual. It is, he said, like trying to bring General Motors, U.S. Steel, Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward together under one roof. As the Hoover Commission noted, he had, after a year and a half of trying, made some "substantial progress." Some items:

P: For the first time in history, the budget for the services would go to Congress in one piece. There would doubtless be plenty of lobbying by individual services, but the U.S. could focus on the overall cost of defense.

P: The buying of the three services had largely been coordinated.

P: The air transport services of the Navy and Air Force had been merged into the Military Air Transport Service, and the Berlin airlift was a dramatic demonstration of what M.A.T.S. could accomplish.

P: Service personnel were using the same hospitals experimentally in a few places.

P: Air Force pilots had at last landed on and flown off Navy carriers.

Last week, Secretary Forrestal took two more steps toward unity. He ordered unification of recruiting, he ordered the Navy to handle all military transport on the seas, and considered assigning the Army to handle all transport on land.

He also announced that he would set up an advisory body, composed of military and civilian scientific experts, to be known as the Weapons System Evaluation Group. This group would provide "unprejudiced and independent" evaluation of new weapons (e.g., improved atom bombs, rockets, etc.) and would advise on which service could best use them. Thus, it could get at the heart of the matter. It could, by defining the use of weapons, define the real functions of the various services. It could then greatly influence a decision, for instance, whether the Navy should go on building bigger aircraft carriers. It could, in short, bring about real unification--based on what each service can do best, not on what it thinks it ought or would like to do.

* The committee was headed by New York Banker Ferdinand Eberstadt, who helped draft the unification plan, and included, among consultants, Admirals Nimitz and King and Generals Eisenhower and Spaatz.

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